It’s interesting, and significant, that most commentary on the election of an unlikely band of largely right wing populists to the Senate on Saturday fingers the electoral system as the culprit.

On one hand, that’s right. The whole system of parties allocating preferences based on above the line voting is an abomination, taking judgement away from voters and reposing it with party hacks precisely because similar hacks have designed a system of frightening complexity.

Certainly, it would be much better if we had optional preferential voting ‘above the line’, where we could number the party/group boxes according to our own preferences. Filling in 110 or whatever squares below the line is a recipe for inadvertently invalidating a ballot, and the case for optional preferential has always been made by the difficulty of deciding between competing ideologically mad parties of whom we know little. (The same applies, really, whether those parties are left, right, or something else.)

But the voting system and successful attempts to game it does not provide sufficient explanation.

Enough people have voted in enough states for a disparate group of parties to leverage preference strategies. Whether or not names are too similar the point remains.

The political class needs to grasp the fact that many voters are deeply dissatisfied with the failure of the major parties to articulate a clear vision and values, to be responsive and open to input, and to be grounded in communities. To the degree that The Greens professionalise (with smart slogans and smart suits), that critique begins to apply to them too. (So it’s not just the Labor-Greens alliance under Julia Gillard that’s their problem).

Tanya Plibersek was right on Q&A Monday night. It’s perfectly reasonable for people, who are disengaged from politics, to see Clive Palmer offering them something that they like – support for education, say – and to make the assumption that he knows what he’s on about because of his business success. It’s not an “ignorant” vote.

But I think that parties and pollies who jump to the conclusion that electoral systems should be changed when they don’t like election results should think again. Surely they are just missing the message actually sent.

(And, incidentally, Tony Abbott will have inordinate difficulty ensuring that the Courier-Mail wasn’t telling another porkie with its ‘Circus is Over‘ headline. But he should have known that all along, as he’s been riding the same wave that just swept into the Senate. It’s karma.)

NB: I’m sorry I’ve been absent for LP during the election campaign. It’s largely been about a very high workload. That still persists, and it means I will probably not have the opportunity to engage in comments threads. But I did want to start writing again.

7 responses to “What do the micro-parties mean? It’s not just about preferences”

It is not just micro parties preferencing each other. For example, the ALP in Qld put both Katter and the motor enthusiasts ahead of the Greens.
The good news is that the momentum for Senate voting reform has become unstoppable.

Sophisticated preference exchanges would be irrelevant if the sum of the micro-parties’ vote was really microscopic. When we see Nick Xenophon outpoll the Labor Party in South Australia (and almost outpoll the Liberals) and PUP attain half a quota on primaries in Queensland, that’s an indicator of what’s going on with the micro-parties writ large.

I think the reason that Xenophon is so popular in SA is that he actually attempts to represent the people of South Australia rather than the party. He doesn’t really attempt to articulate much policy or vision. He is fairly centrist so not too offensive to anyone. But he does get involved with a lot of local issues – pretty much any situation where its the little guy against the big guy, he’s there in front of the cameras standing next to the little guy. And to be fair, although he loves media attention he does appear to actually help.

In comparison the ALP and Liberal senators and even Sarah Hanson Young don’t appear to get involved in anything which is not a party policy related issue. In other words to the public they represent their party, not the people who actually vote for them. Kind of makes me wonder exactly what big party senators actually do.